Posts Tagged ‘war’

“I’m hoping the AG isn’t just trying to pass this off without taking it seriously,” he said. “If this doesn’t work, I’ll take it down to the federal courthouse and see what the hell they’re going to do. We can’t have any lunatic handing out guns to get votes. I’m not anti-gun, but this is just crazy.”

I am so fascinated by the uproar about those snoopy drones that are reportedly going to be released to spy on us. I am a bit nervous that some drone hackers will follow me into the bathroom and watch, but if that’s what gets them satisfaction, well… no photos of me “washing up” will net them much.

What I am seeing is another electronic wonder that can be used by “the bad guys” as well as the good guys. Not surprising, this eventuality. The gamesters who were nurtured in a digital age are full of games-view, and why shouldn’t they visualize Drone Wars as the next fun place to “play war.” Except, as we can see, the little games grow into big power wars and then people actually get killed, and sometimes there is the real possibility of mass annihilation! What would Assad do with a fleet of drones, I ask you?

So the child in me is wondering what to do when little things come zooming around with their cute little propellers fanning the local air in my yard and my house. First thought: CATCH ONE to get a better look. How does one catch a little drone?

I am imagining that they are pretty smart, and assuming they have some remote data going out that will pit my abilities against the operator of this drone, whether the operator is a real human or a robot-type-entity, located at headquarters, or maybe in the cloud. (so appropriate..the cloud.)

What a great new sport, I am thinking, wondering what kind of butterfly net would work best, and how to design a stealth butterfly net to get under the drone’s radar.

What would I do after I tinkered with the little captive? Would it self destruct in my hand, and maybe actually carry a bomb or something to detonate and make me go poof?
I visualize a little collection of these things in an electronically neutralizing safe, and hash marks on the outside telling me how many of “their guys” I have collected. Like chess.

I don’t ever expect to set up an arsenal of my own, of course. I don’t really have time for that. But I wonder whether there will be “time” for drone poachers? And a jail sentence?
Just think of the budgetary implications of that!

And how will the drone-related prisoners get along, all incarcerated together… the makers who sold drones to the bad guys and the drone catchers who were just playing?

Well, it’s good for a new computer game I guess, but I don’t have time for that either.

No emotion can rip to the bone like confronting the act of killing an innocent. But we don’t seem to really “get it” until we can get our mind around “someone like us.”

The people of the western world are shaken because the little children someone wantonly mowed down with a weapon were the kind we see waiting for school buses and playing soccer and acting in little school plays in our own community. In today’s news, it was the little ones in a privileged community in Connecticut, some of the more well-to-do, and so we are hearing much more press about the slaughter of these little ones. What we don’t seem to have room for in our sense of reality is that little children like these are suffering all the time and in similarly violent ways every day in all corners of our world, every day in war-torn lands like Syria, and yes, in the cities and rural lands of our own country…the land of the free and home of the brave. We don’t hear about it, but it is going on all the time. Every day. Sometimes under our noses.

Some good folks are called to comfort a broken heart; they have the spirit and motivation and courage to spend every ounce of energy giving care to such tender and defenseless young human beings.Healers can be found in hospitals, and in shelters, where the press doesn’t come. It’s ordinary in these places for kindergarteners and ten year olds to own stories of violence and cruelty of the most vicious kind. But we are insulated from this heartache simply because it is so common and un-newsworthy, and we don’t “know’ these kids. They may be the kids of a different ethnicity, or of people who are not in our sort of world. They may be the children of immigrants, or children of the poor or children of addicted parents. Or they may be the hidden children of throngs of “regular” people we don’t know exist… groups we are not famiiar with. And they may be children in our own neighborhoods, behind doors with boughs of holly, and Christmas lights.

Now and again we are appalled to find that a child has been enduring violence every day for months and years on end. It appalls and sickens us. But we forget. We can’t believe it!

Personally, I have always had a strange reaction when my chidren are hurting: my sympathetic pain happens in my inner thighs..maybe because I bore my children by natural childbirth and my body remembers the very reality of that event. The power of parental love is desperately strong. A parent will fight for the life of their child. They will die for their child’s sake.

Remember the account of the Massacre of the Innocents …the devastating art rendition of people slaughtering babies in an effort to prevent the prophesy of Jesus to come true? I could never stand that story or those paintings. How, I wonder, can an artist spend time depicting such an event, without being somewhat depraved by the process?

Can we deal with this? What can be our best response, now that we are looking in the face of the suffering of parents and grandparents like us whose little ones have been shattered to pieces before their eyes?

Is there a way to care for people who have serious mental issues that are still at large and liable to “snap” and take some bloody fantasy as reality? Are we able to derail the culture of violence championed by our entertainment media…and why is it we are so drawn to violence, and attracted to guns and warfare? What makes a human a monster? What makes a human think that other humans are monsters? We are certainly at war with our own kind. We are killing ourselves.

The world is trying to end this way. We decry the “sweat shops” in other lands. Do we think of the actual people when they burn up, or starve? Are we aware that there are routine executions in North Korea of people who have been “ratted on” by their peers, simply because it will be someone else, not me, who will be executed?

Will the murder of Christ ever be recognized as the surrogate death of innocence? And will we ever stop killing God?

NOTE: 12-17-12, it is still the subject of nearly every conversation, and I am glad. If we are appalled, let us get mileage out of this awful event. Our laws need to be re-humanitized; we must look at responsibility with as much fervor as we look at liberty.

Nature is ever at work building and pulling down, creating and destroying, keeping everything whirling and flowing, allowing no rest but in rhythmical motion, chasing everything in endless song out of one beautiful form into another. -John Muir, Naturalist and explorer (1838-1914)

The souls of emperors and cobblers are cast in the same mold. The same reason that makes us wrangle with a neighbor creates a war betwixt princes. -Michel de Montaigne, essayist (1533-1592)

I’m wondering how these two apparently irreconcilable quotes are related.As a product of Quaker ancestors, and a graduate of a Friends’ School, and as a young adult of the 60’s, I come up against the facts of war and destruction with an oblique slam, with the one pole strongly pacifist in nature.The other pole of this obliqueness is my very strong legacy of pride in the courage and selflessness military servicemen and women have given to buy the freedom we have to contemplate ideas like these. I learned this at home and at school from people I love and admire, who were as wise and good and conscientious as Thoreau, Emerson, and Mother Theresa.

If Thoreau and Eisenhower were thrown into a think tank together, what would they have to say to one another?

I live with a feisty person who approaches tasks with a fire in his belly.This seems to be how he does things.He grew up as a comparatively small but highly effective guy on the football field on a championship team.His life has been as a dynamo among big powerful men, both in high and in very low places.Running a bunch of fishing boats and their crews requires a certain hard-headed constitution that will go into the bars to herd his crew onto the ship to sleep it off and get to work.There is a type of love involved in that as well, I have learned, because he has cared for these men and risked his life for them at times.It is with epithets and passion that he watches a deadly eddy take down one of his men, sheds his clothes slowly hoping against hope that it will burp up the seaman, prays that he might not have to jump into the eddy himself and probably drown with him.He would have done it.The eddy burped.This person is a person of faith, both through belief, and through experience.He WAS afraid.He was also called to service by his argument with the status quo.No ocean would take his man.

I don’t like his feistiness.I admire his courage and intention.I really draw back at his anger, his curses, his warlike sense of justice.I’m a person who wants to go forward in gentleness and with purpose, and to heal with a soft hand. But there are many softnesses I have dispensed that were not enough to do the work at hand.

Daily I walk in my festering forest.It is beautiful and fragrant.It is busy processing the dead things and the alive ones as well.Plants and small animals are living and dying there in quantity.I baffle the squirrels so the birds have enough, but I also feed the squirrels, in a small effort to prolong some of their lives before they become part of the compost that makes my forest work.This place doesn’t make me angry or argumentative, unless the effort to keep my plants alive may be called arguing against nature. Nature, after all, is cruel in that it doesn’t spare lives.It just uses them– consumes them, and recycles them. And then nature is kind — nurturing, adorning, blessing with the produce. And then it knocks down the beauty again.

All of this is really too much to grasp, if you think about it long.I have to conclude that I will go to a higher understanding when I have become part of the great ferment that I live within.Ferment is breaking down.It is with the breaking down that new things grow.

Is it scary?It’s awesome.Frighteningly inevitable.How good that there is the possibility of faith that Someone knows what He is doing!It is good to have this secret information, sent so we have hope and joy.May we wait with confidence in the good outcome.